A black and gray hearse yesterday bore Amadou Diallo’s body on a farewell journey through the city he loved and adopted as his home – the first leg of a tragic trip back to his native Africa.

The hearse and limos carrying the parents of the immigrant street vendor killed in a hail of police bullets departed from Harlem at the head of winding motorcade of 600 cars on its way to Newark Airport.

The coffin was loaded onto a Continental Airlines jet, which took off for Paris last night. Making the trip were the victim’s parents, Kadiadou and Saikou Diallo, originally of Guinea, and their adviser, the Rev. Al Sharpton.

“We’re going to take him home now,” Sharpton told a raucous crowd outside the Continental terminal, with the Diallos nearby.

“But we will keep the pressure on,” he said, standing on top of a parked car so he could be heard.

“We will fight until we win. We’re going to tellthem in Guinea this is afight to the finish.”

His words followed a chaotic scene when hundreds of chanting protesters rushed into the terminal to see the family off.

The family group, which included about 15 other relatives, was scheduled to change planes in Paris and arrive this morning at 11:10 a.m. New York time in Conakry, Guinea.

Diallo’s funeral will be held in the Guinean capital tomorrow and he will be buried in the tiny town of Hollande-Bouroy, his family’s ancestral home, at dawn on Wednesday.

On Feb. 4, the unarmed Diallo was killed in the vestibule of his Wheeler Avenue apartment building in the Soundview section of The Bronx when four cops confronted him and fired 41 shots, hitting him 19 times.

A Bronx grand jury will begin hearing evidence in the case tomorrow – to consider charges against the four officers, Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy and Kenneth Boss.

“The pain will always be there. My heart aches very much,” dad Saikou Diallo told The Post before leaving for the airport.

The motorcade began at the Harlem headquarters of Sharpton’s National Action Network shortly before 5 p.m., where several hundred protesters blocked Madison Avenue.

As the hearse drove slowly through the streets, onlookers ran alongside in a mark of tribute, some of them reaching out to touch the passing car.

About 600 cars followed Diallo’s hearse, police said.

At some point, the hearse and the family split off and headed to the airport, but the main portion of the motorcade drove across the Willis Avenue Bridge into The Bronx and made its way to Westchester Avenue – where it passed Wheeler Avenue, within half a block of Diallo’s building and another large crowd.

Sharpton said the motorcade was intended to make Diallo’s departure as visible as possible.

“I didn’t want them slipping him out,” Sharpton said before leaving.

“Let the world see what they did to this man.”

People started showing up early in the morning at Sharpton’s office, in hopes of getting a ride in one of the cars in the motorcade.

Barry Aissatou, a street vendor who, like Diallo, is from Guinea, said she skipped a day of work to join the motorcade.

“I left everything to come today. I said, ‘I have to come. He is from the same country as me and we speak the same language,'” Aissatou said.

Tibby Brooks was one of the few white people in the almost all-black crowd.

“It’s not a black or white thing, for God’s sakes,” said Brooks, a clerical worker.

“I know that white people will see this on TV and they’ll be shamed into saying, ‘Oh my God, I should have been there too.'”

Iris Baez – the mother of Anthony Baez, who died in 1994 after a cop held him in a banned type of chokehold – also joined the motorcade.

“I couldn’t drive today. I had to get a driver,” Baez said.

“It’s too painful. I prayed for God to give me strength. The Lord said I had to go and do this.

“It makes me angry, because there’s no excuse for this. If the politicians had been there from day one in 1994 [when her son died], Louima wouldn’t have happened and this wouldn’t have happened,” she said, referring to Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was allegedly tortured by Brooklyn cops in 1997.